by Ivan Doig
An officer, stubby and bright-eyed, stepped in front of him. Amid the wardrobe explosion of uniforms it took Ben a moment to identify this one as British, the sainted Royal Air Force.
"Captain Reinking, is it?"
The mellifluous accent issued from a boyish ruddy face with a nose on it like the round end of a hammer. From that ball-peen nose on down, the blue-clad officer was built about as square as a man could be without a loading pallet under him. "I trust you had a good flight? I'm Leftenant Overby. Assigned to you, it seems. Your liaison to the sector communications branch."
Ben did not like the looks of this. By this stage of the war, he had caught the enlisted men's aversion to fresh-faced lieutenants; that first syllable dangerously rhymed with "new" and green looeys were trouble in combat. He wasn't looking for combat, but he wasn't looking for whatever trouble might come with this British version of shavetail, either. "Lieut—Leftenant," he acknowledged this one with a dubious nod.
"I'm instructed to see to your needs," the pleasant tumble of words ensued again, "show you the ins and outs of the ticker room, and all that. Oh, and your mother branch—TPWP, if I have the alphabet mix right?—sends its regards. Let's see, I copied it off: 'End zone in sight. Brief time-out. Huddle up, scoring play is on way.'" The RAF man glanced up at him with polite reserve. "A bit over our heads in the code department, I'm afraid, and we do hope we managed to decipher it correctly. Make sense to you, does it, Captain?"
Nothing they ever do does, but I get the gist. "It's their sweet way of saying hurry up and wait."
"Ah, well, then, military business as usual, isn't it. Shall we?" Overby swept the travel pack out of Ben's grasp, hovered the merest instant over the etiquette of grabbing the typewriter case too, and left that untouched. "I'll drive you to your billet."
Ben did not budge. "Let me catch up with what we're doing—where is it?" He was determined not to be dumped in some Antwerp hotel the Nazis had pillaged for four years.
"Not to worry, Captain, we're in bunkers," Overby replied patiently. "It would require a direct hit to do a person in, and there have been comparatively few of those here on the airfield."
Bunkers? Here? The inconspicuous airfield looked like a hastily transformed cow pasture—the runway the plane had trundled in on was composed of the metal mats that engineers could lay down in a hurry and the buildings were drab military prefabs—but now that Ben looked again, the open flat uncamouflaged terrain all around left the place as exposed as a beached aircraft carrier. Direct hits were a topic worth pursuing. "Comparatively few compared to what?"
"The city, of course." Overby indicated the low rough skyline of Antwerp barely visible through the gray air some little distance away. "Poor old Antwerpen town," his tone dropped to tragic, "is receiving a battering about like London's was."
About like—? Suspicious of being hazed as a newcomer, Ben fixed a dead-level gaze on the RAF officer. "You better spell that out for me, too. Where's the battering come from?" He knew any bombardment in this sector could not be from artillery, the German ground forces had been driven back nearly into Germany itself, the fighting front the last he'd heard was in the Ardennes forest over a hundred miles away. And while the German air command no doubt could crank up occasional nuisance air raids or Moxie's anti-aircraft battery wouldn't have been sent here, everyone knew Allied fighter planes ruled the skies of Europe by the time of D-Day. "I thought the Luftwaffe was supposed to be on its last legs."
"Quite," came the bland response. "The buzz bombs are ever with us, however. Fifty-some flying bombs in one day, in the worst of last week."
For a marginal few seconds, Ben wondered if it was too late to get back on the plane.
"Not that we censors," Overby raised an eyebrow a cautionary fraction, "like for that to become common knowledge, if you please, Captain."
"'We' censors?"
"I wanted to fly Spitfires, but someone determined a red pencil was more my speed." He hefted the travel pack again. "Ready, are we?"
"No, we are not. The billet can wait. I want to be taken to Captain Moxie Stamper's ack-ack battery. You're informed enough about why I'm here to know where that is, right?"
The lieutenant sent him a quick hard look. Down went the pack, and he took off his cap and ran a hand contemplatively over a dome of bald head. With the cap absent, Ben could see Overby was a good deal older and more seasoned than he'd first seemed. A lip was being chewed dubiously in the ruddy face. "It's a bit of a step—a fair number of miles, forth and back."
"I don't care how far it is."
"Not a problem, then." Overby set his cap as if aiming it on a compass heading and moved off with the travel pack, leading Ben to a hard-used jeep. "Away we go, Captain."
The jeep rattled along a cobblestone road so worn down that the Duke of Wellington's troops might have marched on it. Ben realized Antwerp was farther away than it had appeared from the airfield, the murky constant half-fog of the low country making it tricky to judge distance. Overby at the steering wheel seemed intent on making up for the lost career as a Spitfire pilot; every time he took a curve at a leaning angle, Ben missed Jones and his old-maid driving.
"The heater's up as much as it will go," Overby informed him as if he had asked. "Comfy?"
"Enough." Actually he felt highly uncomfortable with the weighty .45 automatic strapped on his right hip. When the Britisher or whatever he was proffered the weapon, web belt, and holster to him before setting out, he'd tried to turn it down with "I'm a correspondent, I don't pack a gun."
"I'm afraid you're in for a lot of bother if you decline to," Overby had launched into. "Top command's orders. The military police are instructed to pick up anyone off-base without at least a sidearm, and it must be loaded at all times. Of course, it is an individual decision whether or not one puts the gun to use, but that is a different cup of tea from whether one must carry—"
"Okay, okay," he had cut off the discourse, "give me the damn thing. You're responsible if I shoot my foot off." Now he was back to trying to figure out how much to trust this Overby. Assigned to me in what way? To keep an eye on me for Tepee Weepy so I don't mess up their hoopla for Moxie? To lay down his coat for me every time I cross a mud puddle? To pull out his red pencil when I—
Brakes screeching, the jeep pulled to a stop, facing a moving wall of military trucks and a frowning MP directing traffic. They had come to a ring road, at what looked to be a couple of miles out from the edge of Antwerp. "Convoys run day and night from the port," Overby raised his voice to be heard over the rumble of the trucks. "You're seeing the main supply line to the front." They watched the big Army 6x6s carrying food, fuel, medicine, and munitions roll by as if on an assembly line until at last there was a slight break in the traffic. The MP danced aside in the intersection and motioned hurry-up, and the jeep shot across.
"You were posted to England," Overby picked right back up, evidently duty-bound to make conversation, "earlier in the war, Captain? You saw something of the Blitz, then?"
"That's right, Lieu—Leftenant. Look, can we go by first names?"
"Assuredly, if you prefer." He tapped an attaché case lodged between the seats with LT. MAURICE OVERBY RAF stenciled on it.
"Same song, second verse," Ben said. "Does that translate to 'Morris' or 'Moreese'?"
"Either, actually. Whichever I try to specify, half of the human herd get it wrong anyway."
"I'll go with 'Moreese,' it makes me feel like I'm in distinguished company." He still was trying to solve the RAF subaltern's mannerisms. "I wouldn't say I can always tell Hackney from cockney, but you don't sound like anyone I was ever around on bases in England."
"Oh, heavens no," accompanied by a scoffing chuckle at any trace of Englishness. Maurice was navigating past spates of Belgians on bicycles, men and women both and nearly all as thin as living scarecrows, close enough to reach out and touch. "New Zealand's my home—the real country, south of the Bombay Hills. Place called Christchurch."
"Well
, sonofagun," Ben pulled his attention away from Belgium moving past on spokes and wheels, "Erewhon, huh?"
"You know of it? This is magical!" Maurice showed genuine enthusiasm for the first time. "Not many people can locate 'nowhere' spelled backwards, more or less. A devotee of the works of old Samuel Butler, are you then, Ben?"
"Not especially, read him some in college. Odd facts run in the family."
"I know it's only a book done where I was bred and raised," nostalgia wafted from behind the steering wheel, "but still, old Sam caught the country around Christchurch to the very blades of grass. To this day, freshets off his pages play against my pores."
"Maurice? Not to put too fine a point to this, but what in hell did you do in civilian life?"
"I professed," the occupant of the jeep driver's seat said as though it was perfectly obvious. "I was professor of rhetoric and argumentation there at Canterbury College. The war rather took care of that. The Japanese were closing in on Australia, and New Zealand looked to be next, so I joined up to fight for the homeland"—he looked aside at his uniformed passenger—"didn't we all. Naturally, the instant I had my commission, I was seconded to London. Plopped into the RAF, plopped again into the communications branch, put in charge of a pencil. Daft of the higher-ups, but there you are." He glanced over again. "You're a considerable word man yourself, as I understand it, the byline and all."
Ben shifted the aggravating .45 on his hip. "Tepee Weepy seems to think so or they wouldn't keep sending me to places like this."
"Tepee—? Oh, ha. Very good."
In what amounted to a blink at the rate Maurice drove, they passed one last open field and were in the city, aged three- and four-story housefronts with steep crenulated gables and tall skinny chimneys suddenly everywhere. An unwilling spectator to any more misery of war, Ben had to spectate nonetheless. Antwerp had gone gaunt during the occupation years, the German army had seen to that. The fresher depredation was even more shocking, cavities in the crowded-together streets of homes and shops where buzz bombs had found their target and taken out a building or two. At some such sites, hunched men in flat caps and women in flimsy lace kerchiefs picked through the rubble. At others, everything lay in a dead heap. From the doorways of scarred houses still standing, children so tattered and bony they looked feral jumped out toward the jeep and in Flemish accent shouted the universal "Hey, Andy, any candy? Any gum, chum?" Ben had steeled himself for this bomb-torn tour with the hope that it would be his last of the war. Even so, as the route wound through scene after scene of devastation he felt dismay to the pit of his stomach; Maurice had not been stretching the truth, this was sickeningly like London during the Blitz. The jeep twisted its way around a set of corners—there did not seem to be a straight street in Antwerp—into a neighborhood of sizable abandoned shops that seemed even more forlorn and tortured than others they had passed. "The diamond district, largely Jewish, before," Maurice covered a dazzling history of gem merchantry with the sad wave of a hand.
The streets began to show more life near the market squares in the center of the city. Ben stared up at the Old World guildhalls, ornamented to a frenzy. He couldn't tell if the architecture was meant to be baroque or rococo—perhaps baroco—and there were constant glimpses of a stone-lace cathedral spiked atop it all. Everything with the crust of centuries on it. "All older than dirt, isn't it," Maurice read his thoughts. "Just think," he expanded on that, "a hundred and fifty years before the first four ships made port in New Zealand and while red Indians still ruled over Montana, Rubens was in there"—another indicative sweep of the hand—"painting fleshy maidens and grazing as he went."
"What, there?" The tall-standing house with a stepped peak looked like any of Antwerp's others worn down by time and grime. "That was his passion pit?"
"Hypothetically," Maurice threw into the air, and drove onward through the petrified streets.
Shortly they were going past emplacements of heavy automatic weapons every few blocks, sighted toward the sky and crews at the ready. Ben recognized British Polsten guns, basic and lethal with the telescope-like barrel and prominent fin of magazine, from the air base outside London where he had last spent time with Moxie. Two years ago already. If "already" means anything in this war. He remarked on how numerous the anti-aircraft gunners suddenly were, and Maurice allowed as how there were quite a few assigned to Antwerp, twenty thousand or so.
Ben's head snapped around. "An entire army division of ack-ack troops?"
"Quite. It's about the port, of course." Maurice simultaneously blew his nose, steered through another avalanche of rubble laying in the street from a set of destroyed buildings, and talked on. "The Huns are damnably serious about putting it out of commission with their buzz bombs. So, the official thinking is, those must be shot down. However much gunnery it takes."
The anti-aircraft guns grew in size and number as Antwerp began to dwindle into villages and countryside. To Ben it all had the feel of a city-size castle, half as old as time, with catapults set at the outskirts to keep invaders at a distance. The strategy, as Maurice laid it out, was to have belts of artillery across the approach path of the flying bombs, which the Germans luckily were only able to launch one by one. If the first arc of ack-ack fire didn't bring down the rocket bomb, the next semicircle of guns a mile or so farther in still had a crack at it, and last of all, those swarms of heavy automatic weapons they had seen at the near side of the city. The gun battery Moxie commanded was in the outermost belt, the one that had to take on incoming buzz bombs headfirst—oh hell yes, that's where he would be, Ben resigned himself to. Open exposed country lay between Moxie's flak alley and the middle one they had just driven through, and Maurice considerately announced: "Hold on to your seat—we go flat to the boards here across this bit." He floored the accelerator and the jeep hurtled across the stretch of smudgy damp landscape.
In the rush of bitterly chill air Ben huddled in his flight jacket, wishing he had the horse-blanket overcoat on. Maurice Overby was burning red with cold but seemed unperturbed as he aimed the jeep at a roadblock out from a line of long gun barrels poking out of sandbagged pits.
They were looked over by tommy gun-carrying American GIs, obviously primed for business, and let through. Maurice parked the jeep in the shelter of what he hoped aloud was a parts shed and not a munitions dump. They had no more than climbed out when a figure with a certain familiar slouchy grace detached itself from the crew in the nearest gun pit and approached them.
Even when you knew it was coming, the voice went right under the skin.
"Well, well, the famous Captain Reinking. That what brings you here, Ben buddy? To be Rhine King when we whip the Krauts, write up the last chapter for the folks back home?"
Ben caught up with the other familiarities: the glint in the eyes as if reflecting off something hard; the complexion like steel dust; and Moxie Stamper still wore a helmet, albeit one meant to withstand falling flak fragments, the same way he had in football, tipped back just a trifle enough to look cocky.
"You know for a fact that we've about got them whipped," Ben refused to be nettled before they even shook hands, "do you, Mox?"
"I sure as shit don't," the voice momentarily lost its edge. On fuller inspection, Moxie looked as tired as a man could and still be on his feet. There was a tic where a dimple would have been on a face less sharp than his. Never one to fuss with clothes, he had let his uniform become a size too big for his war-worn frame. He jerked his head to the province of dim sky over the ack-ack guns. "It gets your attention that the SOBs in Berlin don't seem to run out of these overgrown fireworks."
Ben made up for lost time with a hasty introduction of Maurice, Moxie sizing him up from the brim of his tommy helmet to the shiny RAF blue trousers. He barked a laugh. "Overby, hey? So I finally get to meet the devil with the red pencil—the intelligence briefers about piss their pants when they talk about 'Baldy the censor.'"
Letting that sail by, Maurice said: "Ah, HQ's ignorance branch, also know
n as the intelligence branch. We do have our differences on occasion." He smiled at Moxie in a reserved way. "Better to be bald on the outside than on the in, I remind myself."
Moxie scowled. Ben jumped in with: "Before we all get carried away with teatime manners—do you know about Jake?"
The expression on Moxie darkened some more. "You start off that way, it doesn't sound like the Iceman is in good health."
"His plane—" When Ben finished the telling, Moxie turned away a step or two and gazed into the gray distance.
"Damn it all," he said over his shoulder. "Who would've thought the whole smear of us would end up you and me? I hope you're carrying a good luck piece, Rhine King. Because," he swung around to Ben, the gaze hardening, "you have more balls than brains for hauling yourself over here into this."
Thanks all to hell, Moxie. Remind me to try to save your life-okay, mine along with it—again sometime. Caught flat-footed by Moxie's accusing glower, he tried to read what was behind it and was not coming up with anything. What, you don't get it that we're each other's ticket out of the war?
Patient as pudding, Maurice had stood aside during all this, but now moved in before Ben could say anything. "Captain Stamper, I believe you're being beckoned."
A gunnery sergeant was poking his head out of the pit. "One incoming, Cap," he called out. "Five minutes."
Moxie took charge before the words were out of the air. "Acknowledged, Smitty. Get on the horn to fire control and the spotters"—Ben could not help but hear come into the voice the snap of cadence used for good effect in football huddles—"tell them smoke break and grab-ass is over. And chew out the loaders on Charlie gun while you're at it, yesterday they were slower than a three-legged race." He glanced at Ben and Maurice as though they were an afterthought. "It's time to shoot something down. If I was you two, I'd get my butt in back of those sandbags over there."
